Slay the Spire is a deck-building card game about careful attack and defence. And poisoning. And letting your own blood to amplify your damage, and hitting each enemy every time you lose a card, and gaining energy by hovering close to death. It’s a bit like Hearthstone, but it’s also a Rogue-like in which you ascend floors and find new cards and relics which power up your character in transformational ways.

It’s really good! And the secret behind it is a detail that seems minor, but without it your card-playing strategising would be for nothing. It’s the fact you get to see what your enemies will do on their next turn. Read the rest of this entry »

Share this:

As the charting games on Steam once more congeal into a single amorphous lump, quickly dive in to catch the last appearance of Subnautica, and probably Slay The Spire too. Next week it’ll just be GTA: Counter-Strike – Witcher Battlegrounds. Read the rest of this entry »

Share this:

Some websites will fob you off with scant details about your favourite best-selling games, but not RPS. Here you will find gaming’s most insightful commentary on the leading games of the modern age. Read the rest of this entry »

Share this:

They lurk, they creep, they skulk and weep. Monsters in videogames can be as simple as a big spiky cyclops ball, or as unsettling as a sobbing woman in a rainy alleyway. This week on the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show, the team is talking about their favourites, from flaming skulls to digitally possessed diving suits, and the clever ways in which game monsters inspire heebies, jeebies, creeps and sometimes even willies. Read the rest of this entry »

Share this:

Where oh where is #9 this week, you ask, uncertain that it is possible to have a top ten without it. A mystery! Of course there are the usual suspects, the increasingly usual new suspects, and even a couple of new entries, but when it comes to slot nine, there’s a gap. The URL for the entry is this, the number seemingly unattached to anything on the store, and not the since deleted entry for the idiotic CS:GO championship sticker collection, as I’d first assumed. Go solve the mystery, mystery solvers! Read the rest of this entry »

Share this:

As you might have noticed, we’re playing a lot of Slay The Spire round these parts. With a few wins under my belt, I’ve learned about the power of building lean decks in the roguelikelike dungeon-crawling card game, but I’m still blown away watching a video of an infinite combo winning battles on the very first turn – with only two cards in the entire deck. It has caused several blasphemous exclamations in the RPS treehouse. Read the rest of this entry »

Share this:

The roguelike card game Slay the Spire has marched into RPS and conducted a coup. Now a slug with a pocketwatch is forcing us all to write articles about how great it is. For example, I’ve just done an interview with the game’s creators, which you can read later. For now, let me sneak out this bit of info, while the slug isn’t looking: They plan to add new playable characters after the game’s full release. “We will almost certainly have more than three characters,” said Anthony Giovannetti of Mega Crit Games. OK, it’s no huge surprise, but at least you know they don’t plan to dust it off when it drops out of early access in the summer. Read the rest of this entry »

Share this:

Aw MAN! Just when I’d started up a great new running gag for the appearance of GTA V in the charts, this week it’s fallen out! And Divinity: Original Sin 2 has finally failed to make the grade for the first time this year. However, you’ll be relieved to learn CS:GO and Plunkles don’t let us down and wearily continue their infinite reigns.

Share this:

No. Let’s not be ridiculous. But there are so many examples of bad survival games that it’s important to remember the good ones. So that’s what we are doing on the latest RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show. We’re breaking stones over the heads of rubbish survival games, but cooking, salting and eating the delicious ones. Adam wraps himself up in The Long Dark but reluctantly sets Project Zomboid on fire to stay warm. Matt gets sea sickness from Subnautica but wants to swim again anyway. And Brendan freedives into Subnautica too, in an attempt to escape from all the mediocre survival games set on red planets. Read the rest of this entry »

Share this:

Well sound the klaxons, unfurl the flags, hoist your main-braces and petards whatever they may be, 2018 is proving far more interesting for charting Steam games. Of course we can’t escape the three usual suspects, but beyond those this is quite the collection of interesting, independent, and novel games. Read the rest of this entry »

Share this:

Slay the Spire is a juicy, bloody fillet of a card game rolled around in the random oils and spices of a roguelike. I’d further this culinary analogy by cooking it in an RPG oven but let’s just go ahead and eat it raw. Because it’s delicious. Also, I’m a vampire now. I had an altercation in a glowing city and the game took all my normal attack cards and replaced them with “bite” cards, transforming me into a frail but dangerous demon of the night. I’m fine with this.

Share this:

Sorry to frighten the more sensitive reader, but, goodness me, among the miserably common entries, this week’s chart welcomes a fair few newbies and indies! Are customers about to get better at buying? Or will we just see these games in the charts every week for the rest of the year? STAY TUNED! Read the rest of this entry »

Share this:

A ghost set me on fire. Earlier, I was beating on a parasite that was hiding inside a metal shell. I found a gelatinous cube that had absorbed so much junk it had become sluggish and bloated. I reached inside it, lost a layer of skin on my hand, but retrieved an ice cream. Don’t laugh. It’s a very useful ice cream.

I’m playing roguelike card game Slay The Spire, and I’ve fought through packs of cultists, slavers and thieves, but now I’m on fire and I can’t do a great deal about it. I burn whenever I breathe. It seems unfair but this is partly a hell of my own making.